Strengths
- High detection speed suitable for real-time applications
- Good balance between accuracy and computational efficiency
- Supports detection of multiple object classes simultaneously
- Open-source with extensive community and research backing
- Flexible architecture allowing customization and extension
Limitations
- Accuracy can be lower than more recent two-stage detectors on complex datasets
- Primarily implemented in Caffe, which is less popular than PyTorch or TensorFlow today
- Limited support for very small object detection compared to newer models
- Requires GPU for optimal performance, limiting edge deployment